Along with the natural gas-fueled economic boom in Williston, North Dakota has come a boom in journalism focusing on the place: A Michael Barone column linked here on July 23; a Gail Collins column in the New York Times published July 25; and a long article by Stephen Rodrick in the July 2012 issue of Men's Journal magazine. There was also a feature by E.J. Schultz in the October 31, 2011, issue of Ad Age. Mr. Rodrick's article seems to suggest his piece was inspired by the Ad Age feature.

It's not just San Bernardino anymore. Chicago is the latest government to explore using its power of eminent domain to take mortgages away from their owners and give them to new investors attracted by the prospect of using government force to buy the mortgages at below-market prices. The Chicago City Council reportedly heard a resolution on July 25 "that the Corporation Counsel, the Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Economic Development, the Chief Financial Officer, and representatives from the residential mortgage industry are hereby invited to appear before the Joint Committee of the Committee on Finance and Committee on Housing and Real Estate to testify at a hearing concerning the implementation of a program under which the City of Chicago would, acquire underwater mortgages through eminent domain."

If Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Chicago pulls this off, it's only a matter of time before President Obama tries this bad idea on a nationwide level.

"The Grumpy Economist," University of Chicago professor John Cochrane, has a post about Greece, based on an article about a would-be shrimp farmer who is hampered by regulation and the corruption that often goes with it.

Steven Greenhut has an interesting Bloomberg View column about how San Francisco Democrats are opposing a proposal to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley by removing the O'Shaughnessy Dam: "The best reason for the plan is that it would remind Californians that the biggest assault on the environment has come from government, not the private sector."

A New York Times editorial faults Senate Democrats for failing to go along with President Obama's plans to raise the top federal individual income tax rate on dividends to 43.4% from the 15% rate that now applies. Says the Times editorial: "The bill is not perfect; it taxes dividends at about half the rate proposed by President Obama, which is a benefit almost entirely for the rich."

The idea that "the rich" are "almost" the only ones who collect dividends is not supported by evidence. A study prepared by the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP for the Edison Electric Institute and published in May 2012 reported the following IRS statistics:

President Obama's former budget director, Peter Orszag, now a vice chairman at Citigroup, has a Bloomberg View column making a pretty coherent argument in favor of privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, which, he says, "lost $25 billion from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2011."

Former George W. Bush administration economic policy aide Keith Hennessey writes about the politics of taxes:

President Obama's emphasis on raising taxes on the rich is a relatively new phenomenon. The Clinton team placed their income inequality and tax policy emphasis on the bottom of the income spectrum – specifically, welfare reform and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. Presidents Clinton and Obama both prioritized distributional issues and taxation, but they placed their emphases at opposite ends of the income spectrum. President Clinton spent much of his legislative capital helping the poor, while President Obama is spending his trying to tax the rich.

Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, spoke yesterday at the Brookings Institution about entitlements, taxes, and what happened in the Super Committee budget negotiation. Highlights:

On entitlements:

So the first point I want to talk about is the truth. The truth is that our big entitlement programs, Social Security included, but especially the mandatory health care programs, are unsustainable. I think we all know that. They're driving the medium- and long-term fiscal disaster that's accelerating toward us.

The New York Times ran a long, front-page news article about a 12-week-long strike at a Caterpillar plant at Joliet, Ill. The headline is "At Caterpillar, Pressing Labor While Business Booms." The gist of the story is this:

in what has become a test case in American labor relations, Caterpillar is trying to pioneer new territory, seeking steep concessions from its workers even when business is booming. Despite earning a record $4.9 billion profit last year and projecting even better results for 2012, the company is insisting on a six-year wage freeze and a pension freeze for most of the 780 production workers at its factory here.

No mention in the article of the company's ties to President Obama. As reported here back in August 2011:

The Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, brings in Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Kennedy to support free enterprise, and to contrast with President Obama ("you didn't build that") and Elizabeth Warren, in his latest YouTube campaign commercial.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes a post-Aurora column: "the bad actors whom the licensing system targets are the most willing to circumvent that system."

He doesn't categorically reject all attempts at gun control, though: "Protection against armed violence is, even in the most libertarian of states, a legitimate social objective."

For the splendor and excellence of the Olympics that begin this week, the world can thank not Baron de Coubertin, the avatar of amateurism who founded the modern Olympics, but capitalism. So says my weekly column. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Michael Barone has a wonderful column contrasting Fremont, Calif. (home of Solyndra) with Williston, North Dakota, home of a gas boom:

This tale of two cities has a moral, which is that no political or governmental leader can forecast the future. Barack Obama and his Nobel-Prize-winning energy secretary thought solar panels were a huge growth industry. They bet billions of tax dollars and lost...Fremont and Williston are more evidence, if any is needed, that the collective decisions of participants in economic markets do a better job of allocating resources than the often contributor-driven decisions of a few politicians.

Politico reports:

Former Justice Department Antitrust Chief Sharis Pozen will join the antitrust group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP's Washington, D.C., office in a leadership role starting in September.

Pozen left DOJ at the end of April...Skadden is an international firm with one of the leading antitrust practices.

Pozen had served as acting assistant attorney general since August 2011. She is a longtime confidante of Christine Varney, the former assistant attorney general for antitrust at DOJ, who left in August to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York.

At this rate, it might actually make significant progress toward closing the federal deficit to apply the Glenn Reynolds anti-revolving door tax of "A 50% surtax on anything earned within five years after leaving the federal government, above whatever the federal salary was."

It wasn't the government, it was Xerox, writes Gordon Crovitz in a Wall Street Journal column.